Web 3.0 - The Tyranny of X Point Oh

Douglas Coupland may have made famous the idea of “one point oh” in his book Microserfs, but for all his capturing the zeitgeist, I don’t think he forsaw the tyranny of “x point oh”.

Now we know. Once the “point ohs” come out, there’s no stopping them. Web 2.0 may be less than 2 years old, but the big buzz today is Web 3.0.

For those who survive the tyranny by keeping their typing fingers at least one inch away from the bleeding edge, here’s a refresher. Web 2.0 started out as the practice of using technologies such as APIs and Ajax to create web experiences that are more like a desktop application than as a client server system - at least in terms of their speed and responsiveness to the user.

The meaning has evolved to include not just new technologies, but specifically new ways of using the web, or new web-habits. Podcasts, RSS, tagging, all are encompassed in Web 2.0. Fair enough, I say. Where Google Maps may be setting the standard for the swiftness of our web experience, it turns out that blogs, Flickr, and Podcasts are in fact transforming the very types of experiences we seek.

But there it is. That was then. Now, it seems, the rage is Web 3.0. It all started with this article here addressing the Semantic Web, the idea that a new organizational structure for the web ought to be based on concepts that can be interpreted. The idea is to help computers become learning machines, not just pattern matchers and calculators.

The semantic web is not new. It was a hot topic in Boston just a few years ago when the Open Source Content Managment Conference was held at Harvard University. Great idea: introduce ontologies that allow computers to interpret and parse concepts and information, rather than just using them to match specific clumps of data like keywords.

The example is Wikipedia as 3.0 versus Google as 2.0. Wikipedia deals with knowledge. Google deals with word matching.

I’ll buy it. I increasingly use Wikipedia when trying to understand a concept (such as, say, “Web 2.0″). I use Google when I want to find actual things, (say, the site for the Web 2.0 conference.)

Upon locating the Web 2.0 Conference website, you’ll notice, by the way, that you and I aren’t actually invited. Well, you may be, but I’m not. It’s a closed conference, though you can “request an invitation” and they’ll see what they can do about accomodating token riff-raff… I mean ordinary folks like you and me.

I’ve not heard of a Web 3.0 conference yet, but that may just be that none of the invitations have been sent to date.

What the heck. I say we should start Web 4.0. I don’t know what it is yet, but let’s agree on rule number one: everyone’s invited.

Links

Web 3.0

Web 2.0 on Wikipedia

Zeldman’s great article on Web 2.0, misleadingly named Web 3.0

Web 2.0 Conference

Google Maps

Flickr

WordPress Blogs

Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs